Every month there is a lantern festival for the full moon. Luckily, February’s festival was scheduled for a day during our visit. In the old town everything is dark but the lanterns on boats and at stalls. You could pay to go on a boat down the river to see the floating lanterns but we did not cause you could also get a good view of them from the land. Also, they were pretty expensive. The festival is packed with tourists and vendors selling goods and food. My mom and Cleo got jade rollers which are supposed to help with anti-aging facial stuff. They also got mango cakes and me, Denise, and my dad shared a donut.

These are floating lanterns going down the river. Me and Denise both released floating lanterns but unfortunately they got stuck in the corner of the bridge. The lanterns were 10,000 VND which is about 60 cents CAD. we released them with a long bamboo stick with a bowl on the end. When you release the lanterns you make a wish. I hope mine comes true, probably not :).

 This is one of the boats you could take down the river. I think that this picture is beautiful. Photo Credit: Cleo Haber.

This is a bunch of pop-up cards that a stall was selling. I wanted to buy one but unfortunately we did not buy one. Cleo took this photo on her camera. Do you have a favourite card?  This is our floating lanterns stuck in the corner of the bridge burning out. Me and Denise’s lanterns are the ones at the very bottom of this photo side by side. The candle lasted for longer than I expected.

We loved it on Koh Rong Samloem, we would of stayed there longer but we had planned to meet our Aunt Cleo in Hoi An in Vietnam. We left Sihanoukville at 8:30am in a taxi to go to Sihanouk International Airport. We purposely stayed close to the airport because the roads in Cambodia are not the best. When we got there we checked our bags and went through security in a breeze and we got to the gate a while before the flight. I read my book by Gordon Korman for a little while. We boarded the flight, we were going to Hoi An in Vietnam but the first plane went to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and we had a 4 hour stopover there. In Ho Chi Minh we went to a restaurant across the street from the airport. We got Banh Mi and a Lime shake. Banh Mi is a Vietnamese baguette with a bunch of vegetables and chicken or pork. I really liked the Banh Mi. We boarded our flight at 4:10 pm to Hoi An. When we got there we took a taxi from the airport which was actually in Da Nang, the city next to Hoi An. It was a 35 km ride. The taxi was 420,000 VND, which is $24 CAD. We got to where we are staying on Cam Nam Island a 10 minute walk away from the old town on the mainland, it is nice to not be right in the centre of town because Hoi An is so busy. We are staying at a place called Bonsai Villa which has 2 dogs, Lala and Lulu. They are so cute!! Yesterday was a big day.

In the early morning we left Champa Lodge and took a tuk- tuk to a travel agency. We got on a minivan 🚐 that would take us to Sihanoukville, the big city in the south of Cambodia 🇰🇭. We had some snacks at a restaurant called Yasmine. I ordered a mango shake, Denise ordered a lime shake, and my parents both got falafel wraps🥙. We almost missed our boat. The name of the pier in Sihanoukville was Serendipity Pier which I thought was very funny. We boarded our boat to Koh Rong Samloem. Koh Rong Samloem consists of 2 beaches, Saracen Bay which had lots of resorts and tourists and Lazy Beach where we stayed. Our resort was the only one on Lazy Beach which was nice because we are used to so many tourists. We were staying at Lazy Beach for 4 nights. On the first day we just relaxed on the beach 🏖 and went swimming in the ocean. Just before bedtime we went into the ocean and saw bioluminescence. It was so cool. Bioluminescence is little plankton in the water that glow when you touch them, you can only see them at night because the sun ☀️ is too strong to see the glow. On the second morning, I woke up for the sunrise 🌅 and read my book 📚 for a while. For breakfast I had a peanut butter baguette and I really liked it. That afternoon we rented snorkel gear and went out to see the fish 🐠. We saw so many fish! Fish we saw included yellow and black striped fish, big circular orange and white fish, and blue & brown fish with a leopard pattern. Unfortunately my skin got really irritated from the salt water and little red dots broke out all over my body 😢. That night we had a delicious dinner and my parents played Backgammon, (they love that game). The next morning me and Denise went to the restaurant alone, we played the card game War and I ordered French Toast and Honey 🍯. It was such a big portion. It was like 14 little pieces of French Toast! After breakfast me and my dad played badminton 🏸 and then we went swimming 🏊. We got a lot of bites from “Sea Lice”, sea lice are little fleas in the water that bite you, the bite stings a little but not for long. After lunch we went snorkelling again and we saw big blue & green fish. It was awesome! Next, me and my dad played Bocce ball, he won 3-0😢. Me and Denise did a lot of schoolwork and reading 📖 after that. We went to dinner but it took a little while because it was pretty busy. It is usually busy because there are twenty bungalows on the resort. I was very tired 😴 so I went to bed early and woke up early, again me and Denise had breakfast alone, we ordered a fruit 🍉 salad and pancakes 🥞 to share. We played a big game of UNO and unfortunately Denise won. We tried to go snorkelling but it was a little murky in the water. On our last dinner I ordered Spring Rolls with vegetables which were very good. The next morning we woke up early because we were taking the boat at 9:00am back to Sihanoukville. The boat on the way back was so nauseating, I think half the people on the boat threw up 🤢and there were like 20 people on the boat. When we finally got off the boat we were exhausted and sickened. Me and Denise ordered a lime shake at Yasmine and my dad got Ice Tea. We are staying in Sihanoukville for one night and then the next day we will fly to Hoi An in Vietnam 🇻🇳.

Hi we’re in Kampot, Cambodia and I’m going to talk about the eco-ness at Champa Lodge.

Here is plants growing in plastic bottles which is eco.

This swing is special because you can stand on it and you can go far.

This boat is an example of reusing.

I like it here because there are three dogs Chica, Chico and Carrot.

Yesterday we went to Bo Tree Pepper Farm near Kampot, Cambodia. We took a tuk-tuk there but it was not a very comfortable ride because the  dirt road had so many bumps and potholes. But it had nice scenery. When we finally arrived we were assigned a guide. Our guide was named Teddy, he was on Work Away. Work Away is a program where you do work for someone like build a fence or take care of a child and that person gives you free room and board. Teddy volunteered to be a tour guide at a pepper farm. First, Teddy gave us different kinds of pepper to taste, regular black, Kampot red, Kampot white, and Kampot black. My favourite was the Kampot red, Kampot black was too spicy. Then he took us around the farm to show us the process of making pepper. First we saw the pepper vines, the vines were grown around small brick towers that supported them. But Teddy said that they now use wood poles for the vines because apparently it helps the plant grow more “berries” and they wanted to use organic material.  Each little stem was filled with little pepper “berries”. Black pepper was made from green pepper “berries” red was made from red “berries” and white was made from red with the skin peeled off. You can see the “berries in picture No. 3.

Jess: Our huge day visiting the temples of Angkor was too immense of an experience for just one of us to report on so Evan and I decided to co-author this post.  We hope to do justice to our day and give you some interesting historical facts as we go.  To begin with Angkor means city and Wat means temple so the literal translation for the first temple we visited is “City Temple”.

Evan: Our plan was to go to Angkor Wat for sunrise which meant we had to wake up at 4:30 am. We took a tuk-tuk to Angkor and followed the huge crowds through the dark to get to a sunrise viewing location.  Unfortunately, it was cloudy so the sunrise was not as stunning as we hoped for. There were so many tourists (especially from China), probably because it was around Chinese New Year.

Jess: Angkor Wat is a temple mountain with 5 peaks. They say it was probably based on Mount Meru.  As wikipedia tells us, “Mount Meru is the sacred five-peaked mountain of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist cosmology and is considered to be the center of all the physical, metaphysical and spiritual universes”. We can agree that it is definitely awe inspiring. We can only imagine how French entomologist Henri Mouhot felt when he was trekking through the jungle  in the mid-1800s looking for insect species and came across one of the world’s most sophisticated ancient cities.

Evan: Constructing Angkor took approximately 40 years, to compare that, building the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris took 182 years. Angkor Wat was constructed during the reign of Suryavarman II, (by the way spell check tells me I should change his name to Superman), a conquering king who was in power from 1113 AD to 1150 AD. All around Angkor there are galleries of wall mural carvings that tell stories of battles and myth. This mural shows the rewards of the 37 heavens and punishments of the 32 hells. This picture shows hell at its worst!

Jess: The intricate stone carvings were one of the most impressive aspects of Angkor Wat.  Every column, moulding, window frame, temple entrance and wall featured ornate detail that would have taken weeks to complete. Today no such attention to detail goes into the construction of our cities.  This was put into some context when we learned that the great builder kings of this time were revered as living gods and in fact relied heavily on slavery to complete their grand visions.  A very tiered society that was controlled by the monarch with a strong hand produced this epic architecture.  This picture shows “devatas”, the female goddesses, of which there are almost 2000 all over Angkor Wat.

Evan: After we had our amazing adventure at Angkor Wat, we moved on to another ancient city, Angkor Thom, (Thom means big so Angkor Thom means “big city”). Angkor Thom used to have a population of 1,000,000 people. It  included many temples, the first one we went to was called Bayon. Bayon has 54 towers and 216 smiling faces.  In the 13th century Angkor Thom was the capital of the Khmer empire.  We know so much about Angkor due to a Chinese ambassador named Zhou Daguan who visited the Khmer Empire at this time and kept a detailed journal.  Some of his journal was fact while some was fantasy. For example Daguan said that Angkor was a big sophisticated city, which archaeologists later discovered to be true by analyzing NASA radar data that revealed many more archaeological sites than previously found. But Daguan also boasted that Angkor Thom was built in one day by a wise Chinese Emperor.

Jess: To put some of this in the context of our day, we arrived at Bayon at 8am after 3 hours of dawn exploring.  It was already packed with people but despite the tourist crowds (which of course we also contributed to) it was still possible to find a quiet, shady corner and admire the magical pulse of this place.  Bayon was probably my favourite temple due to the smiling faces that reminded me of the Olmec heads Dan and I saw years ago in Mexico.  Bayon was commissioned by the great builder King Jayavarman VII. He was a buddhist king who managed to convert all of the Khmer Empire from Hinduism to Buddhism during his reign.  He was described as very charismatic and we assume also somewhat arrogant as it is said that the smiling faces depict Avalokiteshvara, the goddess of compassion, but also look suspiciously of King Jayavarman himself!

Evan: This is Denise standing in front of some more devatas at Bayon. One of the coolest things about Jayavarman the 7th was that he created a very sophisticated canal system through Angkor Thom. Angkor fell when the Thai Kingdom invaded. The Thais took many people prisoner and the canal system required a lot of maintenance and after most people were taken it just kind of collapsed. In December 1997, NASA did a vegetation scan and saw a canal and a road intersecting, they were very confused. Then an archaeologist started digging where the scan showed the intersection and found a very sophisticated system that allowed them to intersect. On one side of the road the canal was dug slightly deeper than the other, and on the road there were gutters. So the water would flow into the gutters and not flood the roads.

Jess: This is the view from the top of Baphuon.  The climbs to the temple towers are super steep, so steep in fact that they do not let children under 12 climb most of them (naturally we took some issue with that).  We heard that they were built this way so that when they were ascended it forced people to be on their knees as though they were bowing to the Gods. Archaeologists believe this temple was the most impressive of the Angkor temples back in the day, but it was built on a soft foundation of sandy soil and hasn’t stood the test of time in comparison to other structures so it wasn’t our favourite stop.  However, for lucky me who did climb up it was pretty cool to stand at the top and look out over Angkor Thom and imagine the thriving city in action 800 years ago.

Evan: But fortunately at Ta Keo they did let kids climb the stairs, me and my dad climbed up to the top. At the top there was a small shrine for buddha with flowers, candles, and incense. It was pretty hard on the way down, I got a little nervous. Ta Keo was possibly the first temple made entirely of sandstone in Siem Reap. Our tuk-tuk driver Te drove us from temple to temple and recommended a lunch place across from Ta Keo. I got fried rice with chicken which was really yummy.

Jess: Our final stop was at Ta Prohm, possibly my favourite temple as it has been infiltrated by the surrounding jungle. Green moss grows on the stone walls and it has a truly peaceful feel.  It was constructed in the late 1100’s as a monastery and a university.  They found inscribed stele (stone slabs) there that gave insight into the size and scale of the Khmer empire at the time– apparently 80 000 people from 3000 villages served this temple and there were 102 hospitals across the kingdom.  It’s mind boggling to think that so much effort went into creating this architectural marvel just for it to be totally deserted due to political change at the time.

Evan: This is my mom and Denise in a big tree at Ta Prohm temple. Ta Prohm was made more known when the movie Tomb Raider came out. The archaeologist in the movie, Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) was exploring it in one scene. Ta Prohm was cool because it was very overgrown by trees and jungle. Somewhere in Ta Prohm there is a carving of a stegosaurus, some think it is just a hoax while others believe that the Khmer had knowledge of dinosaurs. What do you think? Jess: Okay, we are going a little out of order here but these last pictures are actually of sunset the night before we visited Angkor Wat.  We bought our tickets at 5pm allowing us to head in for sunset and still use the passes the next day (a good tip garnered from reading other people’s travel blogs!).  We spent the evening hours at Pre Rup. This temple was the oldest one we saw, dated back to 961 AD. I loved arriving for the first time at sunset.  The light was perfect and gave our initial impressions a fairy tale type sensation where you could almost imagine walking back in time.  Again, we were far from alone but you could stroll the vast grounds away from the crowds and take in the wonder of the experience!

 Evan: It truly has been an awesome adventure in Siem Reap. I think I will remember this for the rest of my life.

Jess: Well said Evan!  I couldn’t agree more and I was so glad to learn about and experience this World Heritage Site with you :). When we left at 2pm, I could hardly believe we had been exploring for 7 hours.  You and Denise were true troopers.

Evan: Bye!!

Our recent visit to two large caves in Khao Sok National Park (see Evan’s post) reminded me of a guest post I wanted to write when we were in northern Thailand two weeks ago. The administrator has granted me an exception to go out of order (he runs a tight ship but it’s a pretty good work environment). In Chiang Rai we were about 50 kilometres away from the cave where that kids soccer team was trapped for 17 days last summer. I kind of wanted to do a day trip there but lost that vote 3-1. Probably for the best as we weren’t going to enter the cave even if allowed (doubtful).

But just being in the region gave some interesting context for a story that lots of people followed somewhat closely as it was happening. For example, while the cave is in a rural area and probably minimally marked, the region itself is much more developed than I pictured. I remember hearing eg. that a few of the players had no official nationality as they were from tribes that spanned over the Thailand and Myanmar borders. But Chiang Rai is very close and is a pretty big city with hospitals that look modern and fully equipped, large highways in good shape and an international airport. Even the closest town to the cave has a few pages in the Lonely Planet with a map of the ‘downtown’ and some recommended guesthouses. So that all makes a bit more sense how they were able to deploy a lot of specialized equipment and local/international personnel in pretty short order (although it probably did not feel that way for the kids). Also interesting that it was a soccer team as we came to learn that the Chiang Rai soccer team punches above its weight in the Thai first division (with some sponsorship from Singha beer). Perhaps these kids are part of some kind of Vince Carter effect local youth soccer boom. As a further aside, the logo of the team (above) is an elephant beetle. I read that there are places here that stage elephant beetle fights and associated wagering. We haven’t found the stadium yet.

Not to make light, especially as one of the Thai divers was not able to get out, but from our month of travels I can imagine the potential finger pointing and regrets eg. about snacks not packed if we had, say, missed a bus connection. Never mind hiking into a cave that promptly flooded and being trapped for over two weeks. Incredible that they stayed calm and the rescuers got them out, and kind of cool to have been so closeby.

I like Ock Pop Tok. It means east meets west. There’s a restaurant and a free tour to learn about weaving with silk.

The colours come from plants.

• Indigo plant = blues
• Teak leaves = beige
• Sappan wood = purples, reds
• Lemongrass = brown, white
• Tumeric = yellow
• Annatto = oranges
• Jackfruit wood = gold

Here are the dyes boiling in the pots.

What’s your favourite dye?